A Word on Immigration

You may wonder what in the world immigration has to do with Baby Jack, well when Jack is born he will be the lucky and blessed citizen of two wonderful countries, the United States and the United Kingdom. While both of these countries speak English, they have different cultures, and again Jack will be blessed to be exposed to both. I hope that he will be exposed to many cultures and languages in his lifetime, we are lucky to live in an area where I hope he will have best friends who speak other languages and look different than him. I can think of nothing better! I was prompted to write this because of a disturbing 'forward' I received today. The problem with these 'forwards' is that it is too easy to 'forward' them, people just put their entire address book in the 'to' box and press send, many times not even reading the context of the message or stopping to think about the people they are sending it to. This e-mail was your typical anti-immigration scary story about the downfall of the country, I will not go into my political views here, but I think it is safe to say I am not anti-immigration, I would be a bit of a hypocrite if I were. Because people from other countries may be reading this, I will explain that many people who say they are anti-immigration are actually anti-Hispanic (which I do not understand either) and think the two are interchangeable. They pick and choose and are happy to have English speakers or the highly educated immigrate, just not those from south of the border. The reality is that you cannot pick and choose, immigrants come from many countries. I took special offense to the fact that this 'forward' pointed to dual citizens as a bad thing, as people with divided loyalties who could not possibly give their all to the United States. Even if you ignore the fact that most all of our ancestors (minus any Native Americans) were at one point dual citizens or at least held dual loyalties, this point does not even make sense. My Baby Jack will be a dual citizen from the moment he is born. I do not for one moment think that his appreciation for the United Kingdom will diminish his appreciation for the United States. Those are things he will learn from his family anyway, not from the fact that he has two passports. There are plenty of people who are full, native citizens who do not appreciate living in the United States. Phil will also hopefully be a US Citizen one day and in turn the feelings he has for the country of his birth will not diminish his feelings for the United States, where he has built a life, or his ability to be a contributing member of society. This forward also pointed out that we should halt immigration. I would like to point out that this would affect people from all countries, English speaking or not, educated or not. I wish that people would stop and think about why people want to come to the United States to live, and maybe feel a little proud. We are all only humans, and we all deserve basic respect and the ability for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (remember when the Declaration of Independence was written there were no citizens of the United States).